The Domino State “Uneasy Lies the Crown” Exhibition Records

This is the debut album from British guitar band The Domino State.

You know what you hate about British guitar bands, like say Snow Patrol, or U2 (even though they aren’t British) after they stopped giving a crap?  How the song starts at one level, then gets louder, and more instruments join in, and the singer repeats the same meaningless lyrics over and over and over?  You know, how if you just lie here, just uh y’know, here, just lie here… God, I hate British guitar music.  Yeah, that “you” was actually me.  The point is, it’s predictable, meaningless and boring.

But luckily for “you” and me, there’s The Domino State.  While superficially their sound fits into the mainstream Brit-guitar-rock sound, with ringing guitars, straightup drumming and a singer who stretches the words across half- and whole-notes, they have a lot more going for them than their peers.  Listen to a song like “This Oubliette”, which was featured on the New Song Daily a while ago.  The song builds itself on the core of a nice melody from the vocalist and really nice lead and rhythm guitar interplay, plus a strong and simple bassline.  The band deftly cranks up the intensity across five minutes, through rises and dips in both the volume and how many instruments are playing, and what they’re playing, until for the last minute it creeps into a Sonic Youth-ish noise landscape (which, to be honest, I wish went on for twice as long as it does).  It’ll be stuck in your head for the next two weeks.  By the way, what’s an oubliette? Anyway, I’m glad I’m not Laura, and I think she, too, might be sorry she came.

Okay, I looked up oubliette in the dictionary.  So should you.

The Domino State manage to play song after song using the template of “This Oubliette” (though they don’t all end in Sonic Youth wigouts), but without the songs all bleeding together to sound like the same thing.  The best thing about this album is the tension that drives the songs through their handling of melody and rhythm across all the instruments.  The singer has a good range and control of his voice: he sings the higher, prettier tenor parts as well as he sings lower, darker tones on other songs.  The guitars, as I said, play well off each other, and the bass and drums don’t do anything flashy, but they do it very well, as a rhythm section should.  In fact, there’s the thing that makes this band as good as it is: there is essentially nothing flashy about The Domino State, but there’s a lot of thought and care behind what they’re doing, which gives their music a depth and complexity that most of their so-called peers don’t match, and when the tension of their songs releases, you’re listening to a band that actually knows how to rock with a bit of swagger, rather than just with the right pose.  “You” would like to see this band on the same bill as a band like The National, and for the love of God, you’d like to hear them replace most of what passes for guitar rock on the mainstream radio.